Page 51 of 107 Days

Before we left Philly the previous day, I’d made an unscheduled stop to say hi to young volunteers doing voter registration training at the city’s community college.

There were about eighty kids who all jumped up, screaming, hooting, and whistling when I dropped in unannounced. They’d made signs for the walls: SHIRLEY RAN SO KAMALA CAN WIN and VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT .

I told them we’re all born potential leaders and that it inspired me that they’d kicked in to that role at such an early stage of life. “You’re brilliant, you care, and you’re impatient.”

I thanked them for what they’d committed to do over the next forty-eight days.

I’d been where they were. A young advocate, dedicated to change.

“I know there are many other things you could be doing. Don’t put aside your studies and, you know, shower from time to time.

Eat some vegetables.” They laughed in recognition.

Back in DC, I met with interns from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute and had a call with the young leaders tasked with getting out the youth vote.

I told each group they made me optimistic for the future of our country and that I knew what the stakes were for them.

They were the first generation to grow up with our planet already in climate crisis.

The first generation who went through school doing lockdown drills.

I promised them I would take bold action “so that those here and yet to come have a livable planet” and safe streets and schools.

I advised the volunteers to use their interactions with potential voters as a way of building community, reminding young voters that they do have power.

“Your vote is your voice; your voice is your power. And we won’t let anyone take our power from us.”

Of course, in these meetings, in person and on Zoom, I was talking to the most politically engaged young people.

It was devastating to learn after the election that I lost some ground with voters under thirty, especially young men.

Pundits speak about the “bro vote,” the “frat boy flank.” I don’t think of them in those reductive terms. Instead, I think about these young voters coming of age during Covid, unnaturally isolated, their lives lonely when they should have been at their most social.

At the very moment their world should have been widening, it had contracted.

For some, the voices that filled the void belonged to Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines, and others who grab attention with get-rich or fitness content, then deliver arguments that feminism is damaging to masculinity and women “need to know their place.”

Polling revealed that many of these young voters didn’t feel they knew me.

And contrary to some predictions, they did not vote primarily on reproductive rights, or Gaza, or climate change.

They voted on their perceived economic interests.

In a postelection study conducted by Tufts University, 40 percent put the economy and jobs as their top issue.

(The next priority was abortion, 13 percent.

Climate change was a top issue for 8 percent; foreign policy, including Gaza, 4 percent.)

My policies, which would have helped young voters with protection for renters, a home down payment, or student debt relief, or elevating the opportunities of non–college graduates, or increasing access to capital, had not cut through the false notion that Trump was some kind of economic savant who would somehow be better for their personal financial position.

In 107 days, I didn’t have enough time to show how much more I would do to help them than he ever would. And that makes me immensely sad.

Every night of those 107 days, my last prayer before sleep was to ask God, Have I done everything I could do today? I don’t know if there was more that I could have done to help those young people know me better, to give me their vote.

I do know that I tried.